What are you Cooking the week of February 9, 2020?

[Joan Simpson]

Tonight we had rotisserie chicken,steamed broccoli and cheese sauce with a baked sweet potato.

[BakerAunt]

Dinner on Tuesday night was “Tomato and Gigante Bean Bake/Pizza Beans,” a recipe from Smitten Kitchen Every Day, which is also on the Smitten Kitchen website. It’s a favorite of ours. My only changes are to add browned ground turkey and to halve the mozzarella. I make it in a 13x9 inch lasagna pan.

[chocomouse]

Dinner was ground turkey burgers with Pepperidge Farm dressing and broccoli salad.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight we're having the creamed chipped beef on toast we've been thinking about for a couple of days.

[Italiancook]

Mike, do you buy the frozen creamed chipped beef or make it yourself? My husband has been buying the frozen version for his breakfasts. When we were first married, I mixed a package of chipped beef with cream cheese, and we ate those on bagels for lunches. Since hubby and I are in a nostalgic mood with chipped beef, I wonder if they still sell it in the dry packages. Haven't found it yet. If you buy it dry and make it creamed, would you please share the name of the brand chipped beef you're buying.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Italiancook.

[Mike Nolan]

We made it ourselves, using Armour dried beef that comes in a small jar and some Béchamel that has beef boullion added to it for flavor. Buddig meats also has a dried beef that works well (it's what my mother always used), and I've even bought it at the deli counter, but it's kind of pricey that way.

[Joan Simpson]

Tonight we're having left over rotisserie chicken,steamed cabbage and macaroni and cheese.Thankfully my husband is starting to eat well again.

[chocomouse]

I did some online reading about fava beans and Italian beans. Although my family has called our garden plants "fava" beans, I'm thinking they are "Italian" beans. They are flat, 3-4 inches long (picked young), green, tender, delicious raw or cooked, and are not, to my knowledge, grown for the bean or seed inside. Online, I saw them called pole beans and also bush beans. I call both of those kinds "beans", or green beans or string beans (although many varieties today are stringless!). Everything I found online about cooking Italian beans didn't use the flat green bean. Rather they used regular green beans with some kind of so-called "Italian dressing". I think I've been assigning the incorrect name to the beans I grow!! There's nothing like fresh (as in 15 minutes from the garden into the pot) green beans!

[Mike Nolan]

I've never had much luck growing either beans or cucumbers (beetles get them both), though my mother always had both, plus radishes and leaf lettuce, along with her tomatoes. Sometimes she grew cabbages or Brussels sprouts, too.

Rhubarb and chives grew near the garage wall, and it took tearing down the garage and building a larger one with cement covering most of the garden area to kill them off.

I've done muskmelon a few times, one year we got several Athena melons that were larger than a basketball and weighed about 12 pounds.

I might try long beans some year, some of them can grow as long as 3 feet!

[chocomouse]

Cucumber beetles are a problem for me too, but later in the season. The deer love beans, but I put up an electric fence this year. I grow lots of things, but less since we don't have kids living at home. Lettuces, spinach, kale and other greens, green and yellow beans, carrots, beets, onions, red, white, yellow potatoes, about 10 hills of each, 6-36 tomato plants, 6-12 bell peppers plus 1-2 hot peppers, eggplant some years, cucumber, zuchinni, summer squash, acorn, butternut, buttercup squash, (about 12 plants each of the winter squash), peas some years, 6 each of cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, watermelon and/or cantaloupe some years. No corn - you know why! The deer favorites are inside the electric fence; around the outside perimeter of the fence is a "second defense" of things they don't really care for most of the time, and around that plants that smell really bad to them or are prickly, spiney irritations. I'm planning to cut back more this year, and also try a lot of things in waist high planter on the deck. Gardening has been my life for 35 summers, sometimes 10 hours a day. I can't just stop.

[BakerAunt]

This winter, the deer raided the bird feeder. We initially blamed a squirrel, when one feeder had crashed to the ground last year, and this year we found the feeder hanging from only one wire. Tracks in the snow are one hint, but we have two deer that come by the front of the house and were quite surprised to find that we had moved the feeder to the side, in part to give the birds a more sheltered spot, as the neighbor has some large shrubs on that side, and there are eagles and merlens around. To deter the deer, my husband puts most of the feed out during the birds' favorite feeding times. However, with the snow coming in yesterday, he put it out in the evening, and the feeder did booming business.

[chocomouse]

We've not had deer eating our bird seeds. We do have squirrels and later in the early spring, bears. Do you have evergreen shrubs? Deer eat yews and similar greenery too.

[Joan Simpson]

Tonight I used the rest of rotisserie chicken to make a chicken pot pie,lettuce and tomato salad and a peach cobbler is in the oven now.

[chocomouse]

We had Hirtensuppe, a German beef stew. It's has less common flavors: vinegar (to tenderize the meat), caraway, paprika, and garlic.

[Mike Nolan]

We had vegetable beef soup out of the freezer on this cold cold day.

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